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It was the 13th of March. I was at home and sitting on my computer as usual. The weather was gloomy little bit cold and rainy. Nothing out of the ordinary for early March. I was browsing the internet and drinking carbonated water from my Camelbak bottle when it hit me. This overwhelming feeling and desire to eat potato chips took over me and left me wondering what happened. I stood up from my chair and walked to the kitchen. In the kitchen I started opening cabinets to see if there was a bag of chips in there. It is not very typical of me to buy chips and then just put them in the cabin. If I buy a bag of chips, I usually eat it in one sitting and there will be no leftovers. After going through all the cabins and the fridge out of desperation I realized that there was not a single bag of potato chips in the house. This realization filled me with various emotions ranging from desperation to pure anger and fury. There is only one solution to this devastating problem I thought to myself. I must dress up and go outside and walk to the closest convenience store that trades local currency to various products in order to obtain a bag of deep-fried slices of potatoes also known as chips.
When I had come up with this nerve wrecking and cunning gameplan it was time to put it into action. I went to my wardrobe and took out pants and a shirt and a pair of socks of course. I put them on me and then took my jacket from the hall close to the main door of my apartment. My spouse asked me where you are going which is natural thing to ask since I didn’t say anything and just stormed to the door. I turned around and looked my spouse dead in the eyes and said, “I have to return some video tapes”. I decided to go for the video tapes bluff in this case because I knew it would put a lot of pressure on my spouse’s range and keep her guessing what is going on. It is important to stay balanced in every situation so you can’t be exploited, and I realized that I made that mistake in this situation. I started to think what my value would be here if I bluff with video tapes, and it is hard to come up with good answer. Also, my range starts to look kind of weird when you consider what value and bluffs, I could have in a situation like that. According to theory you should have 1:2 ratio of bluffs to value in order to stay balanced. By achieving this ratio, you are essentially making the other player indifferent to calling your bluff which is important point because you are going to mix up your bluffs with value. If you don’t have enough bluffs in your range, then your opponent can exploit you by overfolding because your range is too value heavy. They can fold their not so strong hands and only call with their strong hands. On the other hand, if you have too many bluffs in you range then your opponent can exploit you by overcalling your bets with their marginal and strong hands since you are bulling with a sub-optimal frequency, and this leads to a situation where your opponent wins money from you too often. These problems can naturally be fixed by having an optimal ratio of bluffs to value since it balances the end result. Your opponent is indifferent about calling your bet and sometimes you will have value and sometimes a bluff and the result over a large sample size will be the best since the outcomes are balanced thanks to the optimal ratio and more importantly it makes you unexploitable. However, it is justified to think after reading what I just wrote that this pretty much only applies if both of the players are playing according to GTO (game theory optimized) principles which rarely is the case in real life, but it is a good theoretical starting point and a bedrock that your game should be based on. You can and should deviate from GTO when your opponents are not playing according to GTO principles since you can exploit their tendencies and weaknesses to win more money from them. However, it is good to keep in mind that trying to exploit others opens you to exploitation as well given that your opponents are capable of counter-exploitation but that is whole another topic. Your starting point should always be GTO and when you gather information about your opponents tendencies and what they do wrong you can adjust to exploit those aspects of their game.
We are getting kind of far from the original story of me going to the convenience store so let’s return to that. After storming out of the apartment I started to walk towards the convenience store which luckily is just 200 meters away. It is kind of weird that walking works by putting your feet in front of each other in repetitive fashion and you actually can go from point a to point b by doing that. However, after walking for 7 minutes I arrived at the convenience store. I immediately went for the shelf that store potato chips and laid my eyes on the bags on the shelves. I closed my eyes and started to listen to my heart to hear what it tells me about what bag I should choose. I do this often to pick the correct flavour since I believe in the heart guiding you through the tough decisions in life and being your best guide. This time my heart guided me to pick sour cream and onion flavoured potato chips. I was pretty satisfied with the flavour, so I decided to not fight my heart and took the bag. I went to the cashier thingy thing where you can pay alone and you don’t need the goy sitting behind the counter to help you. After paying for the bag I started my journey back to my apartment. The weather was nice and it was fun to walk, I have never had any issues with walking. I sometimes walk alone for 5-10 km distances and just listen to music. I never oppose walking somewhere if there is no time limit or pressure since I find walking fun. The only downside of walking is that it is very time consuming. I arrived at my apartment and opened the bag of chips. After eating two chips I realized that I actually didn’t want to eat chips. I put the bag aside and went back to my computer and this is how my odyssey to the convenience store reached its end.
Thank you for reading and I’m eager to read your comments!